62,767 research outputs found
Evolutionary Multi-Objective Design of SARS-CoV-2 Protease Inhibitor Candidates
Computational drug design based on artificial intelligence is an emerging
research area. At the time of writing this paper, the world suffers from an
outbreak of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. A promising way to stop the virus
replication is via protease inhibition. We propose an evolutionary
multi-objective algorithm (EMOA) to design potential protease inhibitors for
SARS-CoV-2's main protease. Based on the SELFIES representation the EMOA
maximizes the binding of candidate ligands to the protein using the docking
tool QuickVina 2, while at the same time taking into account further objectives
like drug-likeliness or the fulfillment of filter constraints. The experimental
part analyzes the evolutionary process and discusses the inhibitor candidates.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, submitted to PPSN 202
Adaptive GPU-accelerated force calculation for interactive rigid molecular docking using haptics
Molecular docking systems model and simulate in silico the interactions of intermolecular binding. Haptics-assisted docking enables the user to interact with the simulation via their sense of touch but a stringent time constraint on the computation of forces is imposed due to the sensitivity of the human haptic system. To simulate high fidelity smooth and stable feedback the haptic feedback loop should run at rates of 500 Hz to 1 kHz. We present an adaptive force calculation approach that can be executed in parallel on a wide range of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for interactive haptics-assisted docking with wider applicability to molecular simulations. Prior to the interactive session either a regular grid or an octree is selected according to the available GPU memory to determine the set of interatomic interactions within a cutoff distance. The total force is then calculated from this set. The approach can achieve force updates in less than 2 ms for molecular structures comprising hundreds of thousands of atoms each, with performance improvements of up to 90 times the speed of current CPU-based force calculation approaches used in interactive docking. Furthermore, it overcomes several computational limitations of previous approaches such as pre-computed force grids, and could potentially be used to model receptor flexibility at haptic refresh rates
In silico assessment of potential druggable pockets on the surface of α1-Antitrypsin conformers
The search for druggable pockets on the surface of a protein is often performed on a single conformer, treated as a rigid body. Transient druggable pockets may be missed in this approach. Here, we describe a methodology for systematic in silico analysis of surface clefts across multiple conformers of the metastable protein α1-antitrypsin (A1AT). Pathological mutations disturb the conformational landscape of A1AT, triggering polymerisation that leads to emphysema and hepatic cirrhosis. Computational screens for small molecule inhibitors of polymerisation have generally focused on one major druggable site visible in all crystal structures of native A1AT. In an alternative approach, we scan all surface clefts observed in crystal structures of A1AT and in 100 computationally produced conformers, mimicking the native solution ensemble. We assess the persistence, variability and druggability of these pockets. Finally, we employ molecular docking using publicly available libraries of small molecules to explore scaffold preferences for each site. Our approach identifies a number of novel target sites for drug design. In particular one transient site shows favourable characteristics for druggability due to high enclosure and hydrophobicity. Hits against this and other druggable sites achieve docking scores corresponding to a Kd in the µM–nM range, comparing favourably with a recently identified promising lead. Preliminary ThermoFluor studies support the docking predictions. In conclusion, our strategy shows considerable promise compared with the conventional single pocket/single conformer approach to in silico screening. Our best-scoring ligands warrant further experimental investigation
Computational structure‐based drug design: Predicting target flexibility
The role of molecular modeling in drug design has experienced a significant revamp in the last decade. The increase in computational resources and molecular models, along with software developments, is finally introducing a competitive advantage in early phases of drug discovery. Medium and small companies with strong focus on computational chemistry are being created, some of them having introduced important leads in drug design pipelines. An important source for this success is the extraordinary development of faster and more efficient techniques for describing flexibility in three‐dimensional structural molecular modeling. At different levels, from docking techniques to atomistic molecular dynamics, conformational sampling between receptor and drug results in improved predictions, such as screening enrichment, discovery of transient cavities, etc. In this review article we perform an extensive analysis of these modeling techniques, dividing them into high and low throughput, and emphasizing in their application to drug design studies. We finalize the review with a section describing our Monte Carlo method, PELE, recently highlighted as an outstanding advance in an international blind competition and industrial benchmarks.We acknowledge the BSC-CRG-IRB Joint Research Program in Computational Biology. This work was supported by a grant
from the Spanish Government CTQ2016-79138-R.J.I. acknowledges support from SVP-2014-068797, awarded by the Spanish Government.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
The benefits of in silico modeling to identify possible small-molecule drugs and their off-target interactions
Accepted for publication in a future issue of Future Medicinal Chemistry.The research into the use of small molecules as drugs continues to be a key driver in the development of molecular databases, computer-aided drug design software and collaborative platforms. The evolution of computational approaches is driven by the essential criteria that a drug molecule has to fulfill, from the affinity to targets to minimal side effects while having adequate absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties. A combination of ligand- and structure-based drug development approaches is already used to obtain consensus predictions of small molecule activities and their off-target interactions. Further integration of these methods into easy-to-use workflows informed by systems biology could realize the full potential of available data in the drug discovery and reduce the attrition of drug candidates.Peer reviewe
Hot-spot analysis for drug discovery targeting protein-protein interactions
Introduction: Protein-protein interactions are important for biological processes and pathological situations, and are attractive targets for drug discovery. However, rational drug design targeting protein-protein interactions is still highly challenging. Hot-spot residues are seen as the best option to target such interactions, but their identification requires detailed structural and energetic characterization, which is only available for a tiny fraction of protein interactions.
Areas covered: In this review, the authors cover a variety of computational methods that have been reported for the energetic analysis of protein-protein interfaces in search of hot-spots, and the structural modeling of protein-protein complexes by docking. This can help to rationalize the discovery of small-molecule inhibitors of protein-protein interfaces of therapeutic interest. Computational analysis and docking can help to locate the interface, molecular dynamics can be used to find suitable cavities, and hot-spot predictions can focus the search for inhibitors of protein-protein interactions.
Expert opinion: A major difficulty for applying rational drug design methods to protein-protein interactions is that in the majority of cases the complex structure is not available. Fortunately, computational docking can complement experimental data. An interesting aspect to explore in the future is the integration of these strategies for targeting PPIs with large-scale mutational analysis.This work has been funded by grants BIO2016-79930-R and SEV-2015-0493 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, and grant EFA086/15 from EU Interreg V POCTEFA. M Rosell is supported by an FPI fellowship from the Severo Ochoa program. The authors are grateful for the support of the the Joint BSC-CRG-IRB Programme in Computational Biology.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Protein-Protein Docking with F2Dock 2.0 and GB-Rerank
Rezaul Chowdhury is with UT Austin; Muhibur Rasheed is with UT Austin; Maysam Moussalem is with UT Austin; Donald Keidel is with The Scripps Research Institute; Arthur Olson is with The Scripps Research Institute; Michel Sanner is with The Scripps Research Institute; Chandrajit Bajaj is with The Scripps Research Institute.Motivation -- Computational simulation of protein-protein docking can expedite the process of molecular modeling and drug discovery. This paper reports on our new F2 Dock protocol which improves the state of the art in initial stage rigid body exhaustive docking search, scoring and ranking by introducing improvements in the shape-complementarity and electrostatics affinity functions, a new knowledge-based interface propensity term with FFT formulation, a set of novel knowledge-based filters and finally a solvation energy (GBSA) based reranking technique. Our algorithms are based on highly efficient data structures including the dynamic packing grids and octrees which significantly speed up the computations and also provide guaranteed bounds on approximation error. Results -- The improved affinity functions show superior performance compared to their traditional counterparts in finding correct docking poses at higher ranks. We found that the new filters and the GBSA based reranking individually and in combination significantly improve the accuracy of docking predictions with only minor increase in computation time. We compared F2 Dock 2.0 with ZDock 3.0.2 and found improvements over it, specifically among 176 complexes in ZLab Benchmark 4.0, F2 Dock 2.0 finds a near-native solution as the top prediction for 22 complexes; where ZDock 3.0.2 does so for 13 complexes. F2 Dock 2.0 finds a near-native solution within the top 1000 predictions for 106 complexes as opposed to 104 complexes for ZDock 3.0.2. However, there are 17 and 15 complexes where F2 Dock 2.0 finds a solution but ZDock 3.0.2 does not and vice versa; which indicates that the two docking protocols can also complement each other. Availability -- The docking protocol has been implemented as a server with a graphical client (TexMol) which allows the user to manage multiple docking jobs, and visualize the docked poses and interfaces. Both the server and client are available for download. Server: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~bajaj/cvc/software/f2dock.shtml. Client: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~bajaj/cvc/software/f2dockclient.shtml.The research of C.B., R.C., M.M., and M.R. of University of Texas, was supported in part by National Science Foundation (NSF) grant CNS-0540033, and grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01-GM074258, R01-GM073087, R01-EB004873. The research of M.M. was additionally supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. The research of M.S. and A.O. of TSRI was supported in part by a subcontract on NIH grant R01-GM073087. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Computer Science
DockPro: A VR-Based Tool for Protein-Protein Docking Problem
Proteins are large molecules that are vital for all living organisms
and they are essential components of many industrial products. The
process of binding a protein to another is called protein-protein
docking. Many automated algorithms have been proposed to find
docking configurations that might yield promising protein-protein
complexes. However, these automated methods are likely to come up
with false positives and have high computational costs.
Consequently, Virtual Reality has been used to take advantage of
user's experience on the problem; and proposed applications can be
further improved. Haptic devices have been used for molecular
docking problems; but they are inappropriate for protein-protein
docking due to their workspace limitations. Instead of haptic
rendering of forces, we provide a novel visual feedback for
simulating physicochemical forces of proteins. We propose an
interactive 3D application, DockPro, which enables domain experts to
come up with dockings of protein-protein couples by using magnetic
trackers and gloves in front of a large display
- …